Prosoft Engineering developed Drive Genius 2 to be extremely easy to use and yet have all the functionality you expect from a first-class system utilities suite. Drive Genius 2 has a science-fiction startup interface, but once you get past that, it becomes a regular Mac OS X program.

Drive Genius 2 has tools such repartitioning without having to reformat your drive, shredding a la DoD or even better, and drive health tools that enable you to edit sectors --a feature that is only to be used by the experts among us. With Drive Genius you can also duplicate disks and benchmark them.

Working with Drive Genius 2 is easy enough. The interface is helpful, and you quickly find out what to do without ever consulting the manual. The crux of a system utility is of course, whether it works well and keeps your system healthy.

Balanced Feature Set

I have mixed feelings with all utilities that I’ve ever reviewed, except for DiskWarrior. But with all others, I have had mixed results. TechTool Pro, for example: can you really depend on the hardware tests? I sometimes doubt it. Drive Genius hasn’t got hardware tests in the sense TechTool has them, and I do believe you can rely on the built-in surface scan and directory scan.

During the test period with Drive Genius 2, I could even get the same results on the latter as what I am used to from DiskWarrior, and that is a reference mark by all standards. The Integrity Check lets you run a series of reads and writes on a disk for a customisable number of minutes (even a whole day if necessary), with selectable file sizes. It’s thorough test that I know is in use with my local Apple service centre.

The Repartition feature is robust and will let you add, remove, but also shift (to the start of a drive, for example), or resize a volume. On custom partitions you can set custom icons. During Repartition, the volume that you manage will be defragmented. The defragmenting feature works well, but I found it to be a bit slower than iDefrag.

Drive Genius 2 can be started from its own bootable CD. The application comes with an excellent manual that will explain everything you need to know to run Drive Genius from a bootable CD. I tested Drive Genius from a CompactFlash card connected through FireWire 800, managed by Micromat’s Protogo application.

Should you have Drive Genius in your tool chest? If you’re serious about checking and repairing disk drives, and have a need for the occasional defragmenting and repartitioning, I sincerely think you can’t go wrong. For directory repairs, I think DiskWarrior still is the better solution.